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On Religion

Giving Vacation Bible School an Update for the 21st Century

Children at the Second Baptist Church Vacation Bible School, which uses entertainment to teach. More than 10,000 children attended this month, and most were not church members.Credit...Scott Dalton for The New York Times

HOUSTON — When Ed Young was growing up in small-town Mississippi, a boy far more interested in baseball than the state of his immortal soul, his mother asked him to attend Vacation Bible School. He put her off until a friend of his passed along a secret: all the students were going to make shoeshine boxes.

On that basis alone, Mr. Young spent the summer of 1947 at First Baptist Church in Laurel, Miss. He indeed made the shoeshine box. And he also learned the basics of Christianity from the pastor’s wife. During the Bible school’s commencement ceremony, he stepped forward to be baptized.

Exactly 65 summers later, the Rev. Ed Young has reapplied the principle of evangelical enticement as the pastor of Second Baptist Church in Houston, a megachurch of five campuses and 58,000 members. He has overseen the creation of Vacation Bible School for the 21st century — an over-the-top amalgam of Christian rock, humorous skits, Broadway-style musicals and, lest we forget, strobe lights and fog machines.

This month, his brainchild drew nearly 10,500 children between kindergarten and fifth grade, and every one attended free of charge. Two-thirds of them do not even belong to Second Baptist, and somewhere between one-third and half come from single-parent homes, a particular target of Mr. Young’s ministry. After the Bible school session ended, each child’s parent received a hand-delivered thank-you letter, homemade cookie and invitation to church.

Vacation Bible School, à la Second Baptist, adds up to what one staff member calls “trickle-up evangelism,” and it stands at a striking, sophisticated remove from the summer program’s commonplaces of “cookies, Kool-Aid and flannel-board Bible stories,” as the senior associate pastor, the Rev. Gary Moore, put it.

“We discovered something very simple,” said Mr. Young, 75. “You may not like me, my church, what I say. But if your kids and grandkids have a super experience with what we do, I’ll have a chance. You love someone’s kids or grandkids, you’ve got them. Because in our broken world, it’s wonderful to have a home base.”

The serious underpinnings of Second Baptist’s program took shape during a staff retreat a decade ago, when the church’s leaders determined that the biggest social — and theological — problem in the Houston area was family breakdown.

Second Baptist had always run a Vacation Bible School, but five years ago the church recast it in a high-tech, high-gloss version intended to compete against secular pop culture. In so doing, Second Baptist forms part of a trend that defies the stereotype of evangelical Christianity as being hopelessly old-fashioned. While movies, popular fiction, rock music and hip-hop have already been adopted and adapted by born-again Christians, the institution of Vacation Bible School has remained, until recently at places like Second Baptist, less amenable to innovation.

“Evangelicals have become very sophisticated about repackaging actual church services and religious instruction with the trappings of entertainment — the proverbial spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down,” said Daniel Radosh, author of “Rapture Ready!,” a book about evangelical Christian pop culture. “It’s helped that the technological barriers to mimicking professional entertainment have gotten so easy and affordable that any well-funded church can produce a fairly slick program. What this V.B.S. camp is doing is very much in line with contemporary notions of religious education and even worship services in evangelical churches.”

Second Baptist devotes a larger share of its budget to children’s ministry than to any other ministry. Seven hundred parents volunteer during Vacation Bible School. The original musical involves composing 15 to 20 original songs and rehearsing for months. Many of the church staff members who perform in it have college degrees in drama or music.

All the planning and effort go toward what might be called directed fun, an entertainment package always mindful of imparting a gospel message. Vacation Bible School lasts for four mornings, each of which is oriented around a Christian concept, a Bible story and several key verses.

On a recent Tuesday at Second Baptist’s Woodway campus, for instance, the theme was “God knows me,” the story was the Woman at the Well from the New Testament and the verses were from John and Psalms. All of these elements aimed to underscore the essential Christian concept that even though humans sin, Jesus can see the goodness as well as the sin. And Jesus, dying on the cross, took away the taint of sin from those who believe.

While nothing at all is new in that teaching, Second Baptist puts it across like a confection. Tuesday morning began for the third through fifth graders with a performance by a Christian rock band, while the younger crowd watched a skit that had a couple of hillbillies in overalls narrating the story of the Woman at the Well, a sinner accepted by Jesus. Later in the morning came arts and crafts (decorating a bucket inscribed with the words “God Knows Me”) and recreation (a game called “Who’s a Frog?” about identifying a person’s character traits).

When all of that was over, the 1,700 students at Woodway assembled in the sanctuary for a performance of “Rockadilly,” an original musical, which was being presented like a serial in hourlong installments each day. The cast members sang and joked their way through the story of a hillbilly family’s bluegrass band, augmented by a clueless Valley Girl relative, that must win the prize money from a battle of the bands to hang on to its land and home. (That home was a perfectly realized recreation of a rusted Airstream trailer.) Lacking two musicians, the hillbillies crank up a time machine to fetch them from Mozart’s era.

Sliding into the talking point of the day, those musicians were bemoaning the fact that they had done things wrong in their lives and that they thought they would never be able to perform again. “There is a place,” they were reassured in a song, “where mercy and grace are the cornerstones.”

For the youthful audience, the show capped off an entrancing day. “When I wake up, I just want to be at church,” said Sarah Azayed, a 9-year-old entering fourth grade. “Here at Second is like being in heaven.”

Which is, of course, exactly the goal of all the razzle-dazzle. “I will never forget the first shows I saw as a kid,” said Amy Burn, a church staff member who performed in “Rockadilly.” “And to have God driven behind it, even with all the silly characters, is the payoff.”

E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Giving Vacation Bible School an Update for the 21st Century. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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